Steve Hayman, long time NeXT/Apple employee who just retired last week from Apple having started in 1993 with NeXT. His WebObjects demo from 2001 is one of the most entertaining tech demos I've ever seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfWnDJtUyrw
In many ways, WebObjects feels ahead of its time. Sometimes I wonder what happened to these ideas.
AFAIK, WebObjects is still in use inside Apple, but also Project Wonder and WOLips have kept the tooling active (it all stopped working after Apple depreciated the Obj-C/Java bridge) and modern libraries for WebObjects.
It's interesting that they can just reassign an email alias to someone else without any approvals. Could this be a permissions oversight? Or could the person who designed the system thought that heck it's always permitted to reassign an email alias owned by the current user?
Everyone’s super concerned about security and control, but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom. Yes, be savvy about security, protect key assets, but “permissions oversight” about claiming an alias seems excessive. You’ll have 1,000x more headaches and burned operational cash getting everyone to approve everyone else’s every step than handling one security incident in a decade. And even with…
> but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom
Sure. But if that's the case why do you even have individual email? Make everything a group email and group IM. Not allowed to send messages to a specific person; can only send messages to everyone. What would happen?
Can you see the flaw in this logic? Email isn't only for discussing work projects. It needs to be private for discussions involving HR, legal, and other personnel matters.
Steve Hayman, long time NeXT/Apple employee who just retired last week from Apple having started in 1993 with NeXT. His WebObjects demo from 2001 is one of the most entertaining tech demos I've ever seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfWnDJtUyrw
In many ways, WebObjects feels ahead of its time. Sometimes I wonder what happened to these ideas.
It was probably no better than most of the other frameworks we have. Most things aren't. In a set of lots of things, it's more fun to speculate about the ones that we haven't seen, but there's a good chance they're about the same as the ones we have.
It's interesting that they can just reassign an email alias to someone else without any approvals. Could this be a permissions oversight? Or could the person who designed the system thought that heck it's always permitted to reassign an email alias owned by the current user?
Everyone’s super concerned about security and control, but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom. Yes, be savvy about security, protect key assets, but “permissions oversight” about claiming an alias seems excessive. You’ll have 1,000x more headaches and burned operational cash getting everyone to approve everyone else’s every step than handling one security incident in a decade. And even with…
I feel you. I keep hearing people in software say "wild west" when they mean "absence of paternalistic bureaucratic controls."
The virtual space is locked down so so so much harder than the physical because it's "free" to automate, but the vibe is it's outrageously uncontrollable. I get it when we're talking the whole Internet, but the same group of insiders as the physical space?
It's interesting that they can just reassign an email alias to someone else without any approvals. Could this be a permissions oversight? Or could the person who designed the system thought that heck it's always permitted to reassign an email alias owned by the current user?
Everyone’s super concerned about security and control, but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom. Yes, be savvy about security, protect key assets, but “permissions oversight” about claiming an alias seems excessive. You’ll have 1,000x more headaches and burned operational cash getting everyone to approve everyone else’s every step than handling one security incident in a decade. And even with…
One of the biggest time sinks and "velocity" killers in BigTech, and sometimes also in MediumTech, is the need to get approval (sometimes multiple people's approvals) for absolutely everything. Often, approvers are among the most senior, busy people in the company, and "approving a dozen things" is not even top 100 on their list of things to do today. There are people who spend >75% of their time just "chasing" approvers and reminding them to please, please, please approve my Thing X so we can launch Product Y on time!
Everyone’s super concerned about security and control, but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom. Yes, be savvy about security, protect key assets, but “permissions oversight” about claiming an alias seems excessive. You’ll have 1,000x more headaches and burned operational cash getting everyone to approve everyone else’s every step than handling one security incident in a decade. And even with…
> but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom Sure. But if that's the case why do you even have individual email? Make everything a group email and group IM. Not allowed to send messages to a specific person; can only send messages to everyone. What would happen? Can you see the flaw in this logic? Email isn't only for discussing work projects. It needs to be private for discussions involving HR,…
Even with the privacy concerns aside, you need individual mailboxes for reasons of maintaining organization.
I think your point would be better made if in your hypothetical, we still had individual mailboxes, but everyone could see into everyone else's mailbox.
That beats my similar anecdote. At a high-profile place, I too used an automated IT thing to make a first-name email alias for myself, and there was a semi-famous person there with the same first name. It played out much like this story: I started getting email for the VIP, so I told them, and switched it over to them. I don't recall them being as gracious as Steve Jobs that time. Then, the only other interaction I h…
I did something very similar, but the effects were different - people who intended to send mail to other people with my first name had my new distribution list (I created a distribution list with myname@company.com with myself as the only member) pop up as the first thing in their autocomplete.
I started to receive mail across the entire company for people who typed "myname".
I deleted the distribution list a few minutes later.
i love this. A startup I was at during early COVID times got acquired into Hewlett Packard Enterprise, so we all became HPE employees with HPE addresses. There was a similar form there to request "ryancnelson"@hpe, etc... One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "root@hpe.com" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.
Or something like "ab-production@company.com", where ab is whatever a mage system.